Saturday, 22 October 2011

My Testimony, Part One. The first three years.

One evening in November 1980 my older brother had called saying he had something to tell me and would be returning home for good, he was university student in Edinburgh which is about a hundred and twenty mile away from where our home was, had some really important news for me.
He, being my older and wiser brother, is someone I always looked up to, is always sensible and everything he said always made sense, that sometimes annoyed me back then.
I was 18 and he was 19, he is 11 months, 3weeks, and 1 day older than me but it felt like he was in his 40s when he spoke so I was a bit puzzled what he had to say.
The next evening as I was sitting in my bedroom when I heard the front door, it was my brother, he came up the stairs and came straight into my room shouting "REPENT!!!! , THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!"
I immediately jumped to my feet, screamed "YIKES!!!! ran round my room and ended up looking out the window thinking we've just been nuked, sat on my bed, bowed my head and repented.
It was an evangelist dream when I think back about it, after which he told me the gospel of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, even Billy Graham would think he done that the wrong way round, later that evening our two younger brothers came home and we told them "REPENT!!! THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!" and before that day was out the four of us we're all born again christian.
My youngest was 14 the the next up was 16 then me, 18, and the oldest 19, the only bible we had was an old king James, we knew no other christians and we had practically never been to church.
There was on our high street a CLC bookshop where we purchased our first bibles and we also bought some of these small evangelical pamphlets called tracks, we would hand them out to people and witness to them about Jesus, we ended up buying them in the hundreds and go door to door at night in our neighbourhood.
After a couple of weeks of becoming christians we set out one sunday to find a church to join, we didn't know what kind of church to look for, there were so many different kinds, we eventually came across this tiny church that from the outside was hard to tell it was a church, in a back street not far from the main high street.
We were standing at the door of this small building when it opened and we were greeted by three old people who were all in their 70s, they were about to leave because the building was so cold, in that church whole history they had never done that before, cutting their service short because of the cold but when they saw 4 teenage boys standing there and asking if we could join their church they nearly danced about with joy, "We've being praying for 20 years for people to join our church" said one old guy.
We stayed at that church for about three years and every now and then we would bring along a new member we witnessed to that had became a Christian.